Early Look at the 2028 Election

The Opening Gambit It is a curious habit of the American republic that its citizens begin auditioning the next sovereign before the current one has finished unpacking. The midterm elections arrive on November 3, and yet the 2028 field already crowds the wings like understudies who have heard a rumor that the lead has laryngitis. The Twenty-Second Amendment, that admirable prophylactic against Caesarism, bars President Trump from another term, and so both parties face the rare and exhilarating condition of an open seat. What follows is an inventory of the aspirants, an appraisal of their virtues and infirmities, and, at some risk of public embarrassment, a prediction. The Republicans: An Heir and a Spare JD Vance. The Vice President holds the two assets most prized in any succession: proximity and presumption. He is fluent in the idiom of the populist right, he is barely past forty, and he has the President's ear, which in this administration is the only ear that matters. Against him stands history. Since Martin Van Buren, exactly one sitting Vice President, George H.W. Bush, has been elected directly to the presidency. The office is a gilded waiting room in which the occupant must answer for every disappointment of the administration while claiming few of its triumphs. And the presumption is eroding. An Emerson College survey had Vance at 52 percent of Republican primary voters in February; by July he stood at 39. (Newsweek) Marco Rubio. The Secretary of State has managed the most impressive ascent of the year, climbing from 20 percent to 38, a statistical dead heat with Vance. The Iran negotiations have given him the gravitas that a cabinet portfolio confers and a Senate seat never quite does. He is disciplined, articulate, and acceptable to the donors, the evangelicals, and the hawks, which is to say to nearly everyone who voted in a Republican primary before 2016. That is his liability as well. He is a man of the old order, and the voters who dismantled his candidacy a decade ago have not emigrated. Nor is diplomacy a safe patron: a war can make a Secretary of State, and a war can unmake him. Notably, Emerson found Rubio leading among Republicans over fifty while Vance holds the younger voters. (Courthouse News via Missoula Current) The remainder. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley each register about 5 percent, which in primary arithmetic is the polite way of saying the electorate has heard their arguments and filed them. The Democrats: A Surfeit of Saviors The Democratic Party, having lost in 2024, has responded as defeated parties always do: by producing more candidates than it has theories. The July Emerson numbers tell the story of a party without a center of gravity. Pete Buttigieg (19 percent). He is the party's most gifted explainer, at ease in hostile television studios, and he gives the impression of having read the briefing book and also its footnotes. Against him: he has never won a statewide race, and his 2020 campaign foundered on thin support among Black voters, who decide Democratic primaries across the South. Gavin Newsom (17). He governs the largest state, has cultivated a national pugnacity, and leaves office in January free to campaign full time. Against him: California is an asset in a primary and an indictment in Pennsylvania, and he has already slipped from his February lead. Jon Ossoff (13). The surprise of the season, young and telegenic. If he wins reelection next month in Georgia, the electability argument writes itself. If he loses, it evaporates. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (13). She commands the party's energy and its small-dollar donors. She would also command the full attention of the Republican opposition-research budget. She is the most exciting possible nominee and, before a general electorate, probably the most perilous. Kamala Harris (8). Universal name recognition, with the memory of 2024 permanently attached. Andy Beshear (7) and Josh Shapiro (5). These are the governors who win where Democrats are told they cannot: Beshear twice in Kentucky, Shapiro by nearly 15 points in Pennsylvania in 2022. Their common weakness is that most of the people who will choose the nominee have not yet been introduced to them. The Wager: Shapiro over Rubio I will state the conclusion plainly and then labor to justify my presumption. Marco Rubio will win the Republican nomination, and Josh Shapiro will defeat him to become the forty-eighth president of the United States. Three arguments sustain the wager. First, the burden of inheritance. An heir does not run on his own record; he runs on his patron's. Whoever carries the Republican banner will answer for the whole of the second Trump term, including a war with Iran whose final accounting no one can yet render. The environment is already sour for the governing party: Emerson shows Democrats ahead by nine points on the generic congressional ballot. That is a midterm number, not a presidential one, but moods have a way of outliving the occasions that produced them. As between the two Republicans, I give the edge to Rubio, because older voters supply his lead and older voters are the ones who reliably show up to primaries. Second, the unreliability of early favorites. Polls taken two years out measure familiarity, not affection. Bill Clinton was a footnote in 1990. Jimmy Carter was a rumor in 1974. Barack Obama trailed comfortably at this stage of the 2008 cycle. Shapiro's 5 percent is not a verdict on him; it is a census of how few voters have yet bothered to look. Third, the tyranny of the map. A party that has lost a presidential election it expected to win tends to choose its next nominee with an almost Calvinist severity about electability. The road to 270 electoral votes runs through Harrisburg, and Shapiro is the only serious contender who has won Pennsylvania by double digits. Should he win reelection next month by a similar margin, the case will make itself in every primary state that cares about November. He is moderate enough to reassure the suburbs, fluent enough to hold a debate stage, and unburdened by any association with the 2024 defeat. The Case Against Myself The honest prophet lists his own heresies. Primaries reward passion before they reward arithmetic, and a progressive base that wants a fighter may find Shapiro's caution unbearable; Buttigieg or Newsom may consolidate their leads before he finishes his introduction. A Republican would add that midterm defeats often precede presidential recoveries, as 2010 preceded 2012, and that the economy of 2028, not the polls of 2026, will settle the matter. And Vance, who owns the party's younger voters, may yet inherit a movement whose loyalty runs to its founder and, by extension, to his chosen successor. Predictions at this distance are less forecasts than confessions of temperament. This one is mine, and I will be delighted to be refuted.